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Thursday, 28 November 2013

When I first saw Moovly I knew it was a tool that could be used in education for creating animated videos and interactive presentations on condition that you are really interested in technologies because the tool is not the easiest of those I have tried.

What slowed me down was the process of adding animation to my slides. For a non-professional user, it is rather challenging. Had I persisted, I may have come to some result but luckily I had an idea of asking my students to test the tool. So, in a few days the video was ready. It was made by a 15 year old student Raitis who is good at English and brilliant at computers.

We had recently studied the topic of environment and he used this theme in his presentation. See what you can come up with using the Moovly tool.

Monday, 11 November 2013

Flipgrid is a relatively new tool which has been created for educational purposes and its essence can be described in one sentence - the teacher asks a question and students post their video/audio answers online.

The idea of the tool is very simple, however, it represents a great up-to-date method of student involvement. Not only does it require the students to use technologies (webcam, microphone) for posting their responses but also it eliminates the need for paper worksheets and classroom time.

Setting up the site for the students is very easy. The teacher creates an account and makes the first room (grid) for posting the questions.

After the grid has been created, the teacher writes a question for the students to answer. In the example, I have written 3 questions for my students.

What the students see when they go to the link provided by the teacher looks like this.

Now the students have to click on the question and record their answer. A cool thing about the tool is that the camera takes a snapshot of the student's face and it appears next to the student's answer.

My students do not know yet what has been prepared for them. Tomorrow I am going to invite them to record and post their answers. If you are interested, I can write a follow-up to this post. Mention it in the comments below.